An Available Man (18 page)

Peggy linked arms with him as she led him through the house to the screened-in veranda facing the lake. There were other people already standing there—Edward heard the murmur of voices as he and Peggy approached, and detected that sensory cocktail of sunblock and gin. Some were old acquaintances,
others new. There were friendly handshakes and more modest embraces than Peggy’s and Ike’s, for which he was grateful. He was no sci-fi spaceman, after all; only another vacationer who’d gone by ferry over the sound from Woods Hole, along with his dog and his Honda Civic hatchback.

The new renters next door, Louise and Howard Glass,
had
been invited. They were somewhere between their mid-forties and early fifties; Edward always had trouble discerning anyone’s age. They offered him a look around at the house later, if he’d like. For some reason, maybe the instant martini buzz, that struck him as an excellent idea. And when he became aware, after a while, of the one woman at the party who’d come there alone, on her bicycle, he didn’t have paranoid thoughts of betrayal, of having being set up.

She was attractive, somewhere in the same broad age range as the Glasses, with sun-streaked hair; tanned, athletic legs; and the kind of bangles Bee used to wear, sliding musically up and down her arms. Her name was Ellen—he lost her surname in all the chatter around them—and she was separated from her husband and sold real estate in Connecticut. “Have you been up this way before?” she asked.

“For years,” he said. “My wife and I rented the place next door.” He glanced at the yellow house, where lights were on, as if someone was home. She waited, and he filled in the rest, about Bee dying and his reluctance to come back the previous summer.

“That was my first time here,” she said, “so we missed each other.” She said it matter-of-factly, without coyness. “But I intend to make this a habit.” An ambiguous statement: did she mean the Vineyard or him? It didn’t matter; he felt emboldened by her open, attentive face, and by the fact that she said, “Shall we sit here?” indicating a cushioned wicker love seat, after they’d filled their plates at the buffet table.

At the end of the evening, when Louise Glass asked Edward if he’d like to go next door, he invited Ellen to come along, too. He’d already offered her a lift home. The new hatchback, which Amanda had dismissed as “a date repellent” when he’d bought it, would make it easy to stow Ellen’s bike.

They went in through the back of the house, the way he and Bee always used to after a party at Ike and Peggy’s. The Glasses had left the door unlocked, too. There was the kitchen, unchanged as far as Edward could see. His family’s favorite room, because it was so big and had that large, butcher-block table at its center—a gathering place. As Bee used to, Louise kept the blue striped bowl there filled with cherry tomatoes. What did Edward feel? That he had to ask himself this question was a good sign, or simply the grace of temporary emotional numbness.

He remembered the way the light crashed in through the picture window in this room every clear morning and the cool feel of the Spanish tiles under his bare feet. But he didn’t expect to see Bee or one of the children appear in the doorway, or even sense a lingering specter, an after-image of their occupancy. It was an old house and a recurrent rental; people had come here before them, and still others would follow. All of them transients, really. This place, revisited by everyone at once, would be like heaven, if it existed—a mob scene of phantoms.

Maybe he was helped by having Ellen at his side, not picking at the scab of memory but asking questions about the architecture of the house, guessing correctly, with her realtor’s eye, the decade it was built, and that the sunporch had been a later addition. “Lovely,” she said, about the layout of the rooms, the uncluttered furnishings. They could have been a couple considering a rental themselves.

In the car, she said, “That was brave of you,” and he said,
“Thank you for coming with me.” Then he said, “I have to ask you something. That baby, the Martins’ grandchild. Is it a boy or a girl?”

She laughed. “They’re pretty androgynous with their diapers on at that age, aren’t they?”

“I thought I’d get a clue, but the kid’s name is Morgan, for God’s sake. And all Peggy said was, ‘What do you think of our Morgan?’ She could have been talking about a horse.”

“They don’t have a horse,” Ellen said. “And the baby’s a girl.”

“Well, then I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t ask if it’s harness-trained yet.”

They’d come to Ellen’s rental, a medium-sized A-frame about a mile from Edward’s. As he lifted her bicycle from the car, he decided to rent a bike himself, as he and Bee used to do every summer. He’d cycle to the wildlife sanctuary at Felix Neck again. Maybe he would ask Ellen to go with him. At her door, she took a pen from her purse and scribbled her phone number on the palm of his hand. Then she turned her face up and he kissed her lightly on the lips.

Back in the witch’s cottage, he lay awake for a while, despite his drowsiness. He went backward through the events of the long day, from the kiss at Ellen’s door to locking up the house in Englewood. Then his thoughts meandered, the way they do right before sleep. For some reason he remembered that Houdini had promised his wife to send her a sign from the hereafter, and that she’d never received one. “If I
could
come back,” Bee once said in the last weeks of her life, “I would want another shot at being myself. But only with you.”

Silver and Gold

J
ulie was among the first passengers off the ferry. When he saw her, Edward was reminded of picking her up at school once when Fenton was closed for one of its ersatz holidays: Founder’s Day or Reading Day or something. He’d been waiting outside Grove Elementary in Englewood, along with other parents and nannies and siblings, when the doors burst open to release a mob of children, all of them rushing forward noisily, like a gaggle of geese. You’d think the building was on fire.

Julie was a second-grader and Edward fairly new to his step-fathering role. For a panicky moment, he wondered if they’d recognize each other. Then he spotted her—how small she looked, even among her peers—and he thought, with a startling rush:
Mine!
She’d seen him, too, and began waving and separating herself from the others to run toward him.

Now he heard her call “Poppy!” and had the same pleasantly
surprised, proprietary sensation. Bingo, who’d come along for the ride, barked at her until she threw her arms around him. In the car, she was as chatty as she’d been as a child. So much had happened in the short time Edward had been away. For one thing, Nick and Amanda were trying to become pregnant. Amanda had confided this to Julie under penalty of “death by torture” if she blabbed about it to anyone. “But I don’t think she meant you,” she told Edward.

Edward was still trying to absorb that news and its ramifications. He might become the grandfather, the step-grandfather, anyway, of a child Bee would never know, and he began to think of the time he and Bee had tried to have a baby—their initial excitement and the ultimate letdown—when Julie continued. She’d visited Gladdy, who looked, to Julie’s distress, “about a hundred.”

“She’s not that far from it,” he said.

“But I want her to be at my wedding,” Julie said.

“Oh, are you getting married?” he asked.

“Well, not right away,” she admitted. “Anyway, I’ve broken up with Todd.”

Since this was a bulletin she’d delivered a couple of times before and then rescinded, he didn’t become too hopeful. But then she said, “I’ve met someone new, though.”

“Hmm,” he said, knowing that he wouldn’t have to probe to get a few salient details.

“His name is Andrew Gold. Silver and Gold, can you believe it? We could name our first kid Sterling. Sterling Silver-Gold!”

Their first kid
. “How long have you known this metallurgic soul mate?” Edward said.

“Not that long, a few weeks, but we’re really close. And you’ll never guess how I met him. Speed-dating!”

“That doesn’t mean you have to proceed to speed-loving,” Edward said, pleased that she seemed so happy.

“Oh, you!” she said.

Julie liked the cottage. “It’s really quaint,” she said. “It suits you.” Was that how she saw him—an old eccentric who belonged in this gingerbread house? Maybe others did, too.

At least Ellen had declared the rental a complete mismatch when she’d come for lunch a few days before. “I did ask for something very different from the yellow house,” he told her as they sat at the metal table out back eating soft-shell crabs and drinking iced tea. The dog, easy with his affection, lay on his side at her feet.

“And you certainly got that,” she said.

When he activated the fountain, they discovered that the water was illuminated by blinking red, white, and blue lights. The thing was musical, too, playing, of course, “Three Coins in the Fountain.” Edward had trouble turning it off and they couldn’t stop laughing.

After Julie had dropped her things in the second bedroom, she turned to him and said, “I almost forgot—somebody called the other day looking for you.”

“Who?”

“Some woman. I think her name was Laura. Lauren? She said she was an old friend of yours.”

Edward stood in the doorway, holding on to the frame. “What did she want?” he said, although he already knew the answer to that.

“She’d been trying to reach you, she said. I told her you were up here. That was all right, wasn’t it? I mean, she sounded really nice.”

“It’s fine,” he managed to say. How had Laurel located Julie?
And just how much information had Julie given her? He couldn’t ask without sparking Julie’s curiosity.

“Was she just a friend or an old girlfriend?” Julie asked, her curiosity already sparked without any prompting from him.

“You’ve got romance on your mind, Mrs. Silver-Gold,” Edward said.

“That’s because of this stupid TV show I’ve become addicted to.
First Love
,
Second Chance
? I’m sure
you’ve
never seen it. Do you still only watch those things where animals devour each other? Anyway, they reunite people who broke up when they were younger—”

“You’re right on both counts, I’ve never seen it, and it does sound stupid.”

“But that’s the latest thing,” she said. “And it’s kind of fascinating—long-lost lovers finding each other again.” Then, mercifully, her cell phone rang and he left the doorway to give her privacy. As he walked down the hall to his bedroom, he could hear her whispering and laughing.

Edward took Julie out for dinner that night. He’d thought of asking Ellen to join them, but decided that Julie would probably need his focused attention; she was going to be with him for only three days. And it might seem presumptuous to introduce Ellen to a member of his family, even under these casual circumstances. But he did tell her that Julie was visiting and that he’d call her in a few days. “If you don’t, I’ll call you,” she said.

Their lunch in his backyard had followed a morning bike ride to Felix Neck. At the edge of one of the ponds, they saw a pair of green herons and a family of mute swans that Edward noted in his journal. “Fine weather, fine company,” he added. And in the woods, Ellen pointed out an orchard oriole, a bird he had never seen there before.

The night before the visit to Felix Neck, they’d been invited
to the same July 4 beach party. When Edward took her home that second time, the kiss at the door lasted longer and was more charged. “Wow, are you seeing fireworks, too?” he said, as the last of the skyrockets boomed in the distance and lit up the night. They kissed again, but when he asked if he could come inside, she said she’d rather take things slowly, if he didn’t mind. Her separation was pretty recent and she was still adjusting to a whole new way of being.

Of course he minded. He was aroused by the kissing, and his celibacy was beginning to seem like a grotesque private joke. He hadn’t been this sexually frustrated since adolescence. What if he forgot how? But maybe it was like riding a bicycle, something your body holds in memory for you. And he was a little wobbly at first on the rented bike the next day, after a two-year hiatus, but soon he was rolling along easily beside Ellen on the way to Felix Neck.

“So tell me about this Andrew Gold,” he said to Julie at dinner.

“Well, he’s an accountant—not the most glamorous job in the world.” That distinction belonged to Todd, of course—a bank clerk who’d started moonlighting as a deejay at a club in Noho, one of several venues where he came onto other women.

“Steady, probably, though,” Edward said, “and lucrative. Baby Sterling’s gonna need new shoes.”

“He’s very funny,” Julie said, “Not funny ha-ha, but in a wry way, like you.” She took a deep breath. “And he thinks I’m beautiful,” she added shyly.

“Then he has good taste,” Edward said.

“Or he needs glasses. Actually, he
wears
glasses.”

“Jules, you’re an idiot,” he said. “But a beautiful idiot.”

Much later that night, Edward passed her bedroom on his way to the bathroom. There was no light visible under her door,
and he assumed she was asleep. But then he heard her talking softly, probably into her cell phone again. Her voice sounded querulous this time, and then beseeching, and he guessed that she wasn’t talking to the new guy, to the twenty-four-karat Andrew Gold.